Doctoral Dissertation in Political Science: Explaining Patterns of Regulatory Enforcement

这个博士论文研究支持项目的重点是在职业安全的政府监管的执法模式。 该项目开发和测试了一种理论，解释了职业安全与健康管理局（OSHA）如何与州机构合作，执行《职业安全与健康法》。 该项目的中心目标是推进政治学的知识状态，了解遵守法律的不确定性如何改变法律的执行方式。 该项目通过展示合规的不确定性如何导致：1）制定反映战略决策的执法程序; 2）根据容易观察到的政策产出，采用执法人员评估程序。 这些惯例和程序直接决定了监管结果，并进一步制约了试图影响政策结果的强大集团的成功。 因此，一个数据集已经构建，分解OSHAct的执法过程中区分检查目标，处罚，处罚后的谈判和诉讼。 该数据集包括有关所有受OSHAct监管的私人设施的信息，使调查人员能够诊断被过滤到执法过程中的设施和完全避免检查的设施的处理情况。 此外，通过获得有关个别设施的实际安全条件的信息（即使是OSHA自己的外地办事处也无法获得的信息），调查员可以比较在执法过程的不同阶段，在不同程度的不确定性下，以及在各种群体影响环境中对“类似”设施的处理。 这些数据是通过对奥什抽样单位和州机构外地办事处的人员进行访谈收集的。

This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project focuses on patterns of enforcement in government regulation of occupational safety. The project develops and tests a theory that explains how the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), in cooperation with state agencies, enforces the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The project's central aim is to advance the state of knowledge in political science on the way in which uncertainty about compliance alters how the law is enforced. The project does so by showing how uncertainty about compliance leads to 1) the development of enforcement routines that reflect strategic decision-making and 2) the adoption of evaluative procedures for enforcement personnel based on easily observed policy outputs. These routines and procedures directly determine regulatory outcomes and further condition the success of powerful groups seeking to influence policy outcomes.Testing the theories involves an examination of how individual cases are treated throughout the enforcement process. Therefore, a data set has been constructed that disaggregates the OSHAct enforcement process by distinguishing inspection targeting, penalty imposition, and post-penalty negotiation and litigation. This data set includes information about all private facilities subject to OSHAct regulation, allowing the investigator to diagnose both the treatment of facilities that are filtered into the enforcement process and those facilities that avoid inspection altogether. Furthermore, with access to information about actual safety conditions at individual facilities (information that is not available even to OSHA's own field offices), the investigator can compare the treatment of "similar" facilities in different stages of the enforcement process, under different levels of uncertainty about compliance, and in a variety of group influence environments. The data are collected through interviews with personnel in a sample of OSH and state agency field offices.